In addition to the bearing factory, which opened the first record, the next step was the metal foam factory. After all, smelting is Wen Desi's old business, these are the industries he is most familiar with, and when he was a college dog, he learned this every day. has been the head of state for decades, but there are not many opportunities to use his own professional skills, which makes Mr. Wen sometimes inevitably have some regrets about walking at night and resurrecting his flesh.

"Labor and management are the world's most proficient experts in extraterrestrial smelting, ahhhh......h

As a result, Mr. Wen returned to his old business and personally presided over the planning and design of the first batch of space smelters on the plane. With the guidance of Wen Desi, a great expert, China's space smelter is progressing extremely fast. In May 1938, all the ground operations were completed, and then they were divided into dozens of cargo compartments and all of them were put into orbit at a frequency of six times a day and within half a month. At the end of June, the assembly and commissioning of the plant complex was completed, and trial production began.

The first thing to do is foam steel, which is the simplest foam metal. But it can't be done on the ground, because the earth has gravity, and the bubbles can't be evenly distributed in the molten steel, nor can they form a perfect spherical shape, so they basically can't do it, and they can only stay in the theoretical stage. But this thing is very simple to manufacture in space, that is, the steel ingots sent by the electric furnace are melted into molten steel and poured into the casting mold, and then the nozzle is used to inject hydrogen into the molten steel and mix and stir, the bubbles will be evenly distributed inside the molten steel, and form a perfect spherical shape, and then after static cooling, it becomes a high-performance steel plate steel beam made of foam steel.

When the production process was determined, the warehouse factory was also built from the ground, which was pushed onto the track by a bridge and then pushed to the factory track by barge. A foam steel production warehouse can produce 650 tons of steel beams or plates per day as long as it receives sufficient material supply. After consideration, the senior management of Tianhe Group drove four foam steel production cabins to the factory track, and provided one launch per day through the bridge to supply 660 tons of raw steel and hydrogen and other raw materials (the empty weight of the truck is 60 tons, and the maximum load is 660 tons). Under such full load, it can produce 23 per year. 70,000 tons of steel foam. Seventy percent of them are loaded onto return trucks and transported back to the surface, where they are also sold to the military industry. The remaining 30% was reserved for the construction of the track structure. This foam steel is an excellent material for the construction of spaceships and space stations.

Then there are smelting plants for various special alloys, which have also been launched one after another. In the absence of gravity, even two metals with very different specific gravity can be perfectly mixed, which allows space smelters to smelt many alloys that cannot be produced on Earth, such as aluminum and tungsten. There is also the iron and aluminum alloy that is currently used in large quantities in military projects, which has always been a big problem in the production of this thing on the earth, and the yield rate cannot satisfy Wen Desi.

But smelting in space is completely different, and it's hard to succeed or not. What's more, it can also be made into lighter foamed iron-aluminum alloy, which is even more incredible. An airplane made of iron-aluminum alloy that weighs lighter than water and has higher strength than steel makes it sour to think about.

Then there is optical fiber, since 1913, after China made various lasers, Wen Desi organized personnel to start researching the production of optical fibers, but until the 30s, it took more than 20 years, and the results were very limited. It's not that optical fibers can't be made at this time, but with the process technology at this time, the cost of producing optical fibers is so high that Wen Desi can't accept it.

The basic material of optical fiber is glass fiber, which is a very thin glass filament with a diameter of tens of microns. However, because it is too thin, it is very easy to break during production, because once the length reaches a threshold, before the liquid glass filament solidifies, it will be pulled into small sections due to gravity, which severely limits the length of the fiber.

Generally speaking, the finer the fiber, the higher the efficiency and the greater the communication bandwidth. But the thinner the fiber, the more susceptible it is to gravity, and the shorter the length must be. Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the length of a 15-micron fiber was at most a dozen meters, and the length of a 50-micron fiber was at most more than 100 meters. Only thicker fibers larger than 100 or 200 microns can withstand the weight of the cable itself when cooled, which can be hundreds of kilometers. This is the result of nearly 30 years of research and development, before which optical fiber can only be made very short, so a large number of repeaters need to be installed in the middle of the long-range optical fiber backbone, resulting in its high price.

In the 30s on this plane, even if Mr. Wen used all kinds of means to open up, the speed of progress was still not large. Until last year, the length of a 100-micron thick fiber could only be made about 200 meters, and it was very easy to break if it was longer, barely reaching the level of the first few years of the early 21st century. The research team has focused on improving the material added to the molten glass and adjusting the cooling rate to withstand more weight during condensation, resulting in longer filaments. However, according to the current progress estimates, I am afraid it will take more than ten or twenty years.

Well, this result was already very good in the eyes of people at the time, but for Wen Desi, it was far from enough. Of course, we know that plastic can also be made into optical fibers, but plastic optical fibers are only cheap, and their performance is far less than that of glass optical fibers.

However, after the completion of the bridge to the sky, this problem was solved.

At the sound of Wen Desi's order, the optical fiber team installed a set of production machines in the cargo compartment and drove them into the orbit for experiments. And the results shocked them. 100 m, 500 m, 1000 m, 2000 m, 4000 m...... 10,000 meters! They kept pulling out longer fibers to cool them, but none of them broke as they cooled, and there was no end in sight to the length of the fiber! And the diameter of this fiber was only 10 microns!

That's so ...... Too...... The test personnel present were all scorched and messy in the wind. After that, they don't need to think about wire breakage, and can focus on improving the optical performance of the fiber, instead of having to compromise the optical performance by adding fastening materials because of wire breakage.

After three months of testing, the optical fiber test team submitted a report recommending that the optical fiber production line on the ground should be completely abandoned and fully switched to rail factory production!

Then the project is the production of silicon wafers for semiconductors. This is a priority option that has been on the schedule since the outset and is currently receiving everyone's attention. Silicon wafers are used for more than just the computer industry. Yes, the computer industry is very important, but there is an even more important one at hand, and that is the energy project, that is, the solar photovoltaic panels.

In space, the cheapest and most convenient energy source is solar energy, and solar panels need silicon wafers, and the higher the quality and larger the silicon wafer, the better the energy conversion rate. But it is difficult to produce large silicon wafers on the planet, and the price is very attractive, which is not conducive to promotion.

In addition, it is Wendesi who is ready to build the planned orbital solar power plant as soon as possible. However, there is a problem with this solar power plant. In the age of rockets, the biggest problem was how to get the material into orbit. Now this problem has been solved thanks to the completion of the bridge to the sky. The remaining question is, how can we get enough and cheap enough photovoltaic panels?

Solar photovoltaic panels, at present, the production is high enough and the cheapest is silicon-based photovoltaic panels, that is, photovoltaic panels made of silicon wafers. But the cheapest is only compared to other photovoltaic panels under development, and the price itself is still very expensive. If you build a power station, the cost will be several times that of a nuclear power plant. Therefore, it is necessary to look at ways to reduce prices. The most direct way is to increase the output and production efficiency of the wafer, or in other words, increase the diameter of the wafer.

Of course, it is also possible to use cheap plastic to make photovoltaic panels, but this thing is the same as plastic optical fibers, in addition to being cheap and can be bent at will, the conversion rate is much lower than that of silicon wafers. In this way, the most cost-effective is still silicon-based photovoltaic panels.

Silicon wafer refers to the silicon wafer used to make silicon semiconductors, which is round in shape, so it is called wafer. Silicon wafer is "monocrystalline silicon", the production raw material is the sand (the main component of silica) that can be seen everywhere on the ground, when the required silicon elements are extracted from the sand, after reduction and other treatments, about 98% coarse crystals can be extracted, and then through the purification process, purified polysilicon can be obtained, its shape is granular or rod-like, and the purity is as high as five nines or more, that is, 99. More than 999%.

The polycrystalline silicon is then melted, a small silicon crystal seed is mixed into the melt, and a cylindrical monocrystalline silicon rod is slowly pulled. Since silicon crystals are gradually formed from a small grain in a molten state of silicon raw material, this process is called "crystal growth". After grinding, polishing and slicing, the silicon crystal rod becomes the basic raw material for making integrated circuits and photovoltaic panels - silicon wafers, which are "silicon wafers".

Among the wafers cut by silicon crystal rods, the better quality is called production wafers, and the higher ones are called Lei wafers. Production wafers and epiphyte wafers are almost always concentrated in the middle part of the silicon wafer bar. Wafers cut out at the head and tail ends, which have a greater chance of defects, are usually used for non-production purposes, called test wafers, and test wafers are usually sent back to the factory for reprocessing into recycled wafers.

Finally, the quality of the silicon wafers is sent to the fab to manufacture wafer circuits, and hundreds of identical silicon wafers can be reproduced on each silicon wafer. These wafer circuits are then processed by complex chemical and electronic processes after packaging and testing procedures, and then they are covered with multiple layers of fine electronic circuits, which become integrated circuits on the market. If you want to use it on solar panels, you can use a whole round wafer directly or cut it into smaller squares.

However, on Earth, it is difficult to produce such silicon wafers, and the larger the diameter, the more difficult it is, which is high-tech. At the beginning of the 21st century, silicon ingots with a diameter of 12 inches (300 mm) could be mass-produced, and the largest was only 14 inches (360 mm). Because its production is affected by gravity, every little increase in diameter costs a huge amount. But in a gravity-free sky, all this is no longer a problem. Theoretically, its diameter growth is unlimited.

At present, China's technology can produce 250 mm (10 inches) of silicon ingots in factories and 300 mm wafers in the laboratory, barely reaching the level of the early 21st century, which is a very early level in Wendesi's view. On top of that, the price is still hard to accept.

Therefore, before the final test of Tongtianqiao was completed, the wafer laboratory of the China Semiconductor Research Institute was ordered to load a complete set of production equipment into a warehouse. After the establishment of Tiangong-1, this orbital wafer laboratory was launched, docked with Tiangong-1, and began orbital wafer growth experiments.

Unlike other factories, orbital wafer labs require gravity for crystal growth. Although crystals can be grown without gravity, the "silicon crystal ball" instead of the "silicon crystal rod" that grows in this way will be a little troublesome in processing and a lot of waste. As a result, the orbital wafer laboratory is connected to a rotating shaft, far opposite the cabin of another production laboratory, and rotates slowly with electric drive, which is one of the few gravity laboratories in Tiangong-1. Of course, the rotational speed is adjusted not to full gravity, but only one to one-tenth of gravity, 0. 01～0。 1G degree. The gravity of this lab can be easily adjusted, just adjust the rotational speed. It is in this context that engineers at the Orbital Wafer Laboratory begin to perform crystal growth experiments.

And the final result they got was extremely amazing, it was a large and small silicon crystal rod, the largest of which was a huge silicon crystal rod with a diameter of two meters, a length of 12 meters, and a weight of 88 tons. In fact, it can be made bigger, but the equipment is not that big. Except for a few of these silicon rods that are sent to the finished product laboratory, the rest are carefully packaged and loaded into a return truck to be sent back to the laboratory on the ground for cutting. When this batch of silicon crystal rods appeared on the ground, everyone's eyes straightened. Everyone was speechless by the thunder of these huge monsters.

The wafer laboratory on the ground quickly cut and analyzed this batch of silicon crystal rods, and found that most of the silicon crystal rods cut out were high-quality epitaxial wafers, and the proportion of wafers produced was very small, and the test wafers of defective products were almost impossible to find. After analyzing the process and loss finally summarized by the orbital wafer laboratory, the conclusion was reached. At least in terms of silicon crystal purification and crystal growth, the product yield rate of the orbital wafer laboratory is ten times higher than that of the ground laboratory, and the cost is only one-fifth, so the efficiency is fifty times. At this time, the guys engaged in the production of finished products also jumped out and said that the environment of the track can reduce the cost of integrated circuits and photovoltaic panels by half, and the yield rate can be doubled.

Of course, Wen Deji also wants to, but the problem is that the factory is not said to be accommodating. The relocation of the factory itself is quite fast, and it is good to arrange the factory equipment on the ground to be packaged into the warehouse, and then put it on the track. The problem is that once the factory is up, the next step is to transport the materials up and the finished product back to the ground. However, the current power supply of the bridge is greatly insufficient, and it is only enough to run six times a day.

Half a year after the Tiangong-1 test base was put into operation, even the most stubborn people admit that it is necessary to increase the projection volume of the existing bridge to the sky. Six cargo projections a day, a total of 4,320 tons of cargo in the warehouse, or 3,960 tons of cargo is not enough. Yes, there may not be much demand for new buildings on the tracks, but if nothing else, the capacity of the few rail factories currently projected is limited by materials. Bearing balls are just that, this quantity is large but the mass is small, and it basically does not occupy the transportation tonnage. However, after the first samples of such things as metal foam and new alloys were sent back to the ground and distributed to various factories for testing, all kinds of military factories across the country now demanded a large supply, and even civilian enterprises, especially automobile and motorcycle factories, heard the news and asked for supplies.

Qian Xuesen, the chief engineer of the rocket group, believed that there would be no 26 million tons of transportation in orbit in the next 18 years, so he was puzzled by Wen Desi's certainty of recovering costs. Now he understands that in the short term there may indeed be no need to build a 26 million ton building in orbit. But just the materials that are sent to the track for processing, such as the manufacture of metal foam, alone have nearly 240,000 tons a year. Looking at the demand books from factories around the country, they can eat all the 24 million tons a year, and they can't wait to replace all the steel with foam steel.

As for those new alloys, not to mention, this was made by Wen Desi himself on a trip to space and instructed them on the spot. During the production, Wen Desi also had a momentary itch, operated it in front of the furnace, and refined several furnaces of new alloys.

There is also the "Copper Dragon" high-energy battery and tungsten whisker armor that were made before. The growth rate and quality of this tungsten whisker in space are also far higher than those of Earth, and the cost and scrap rate are greatly reduced. And the reason why this high-energy battery has not been upgraded to the "Golden Dragon" is because the earth cannot produce iron-sodium alloys that meet the requirements. But once in space, these production difficulties no longer exist.

These samples were sent back to Earth one by one, and after the test, the experts went crazy, and the performance parameters were greatly increased, ranging from several times, more than ten times or even dozens of times, and the scrap rate was reduced to an incredible degree, and the cost was also reduced several times. So they all asked to move and move all these factories to space!

Yes, none of these requirements existed before the construction of the bridge. However, when the construction of the bridge was completed and the establishment of Tiangong-1 was completed, after a short-term test, a huge market and countless needs were immediately born out of thin air.

Not to mention, there are also products in various fields such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agronomy, biology, etc., which are being tested one by one, and all of them have been incredibly successful. Now, after testing the samples sent back from Tiangong-1, experts in these fields are all dancing in ecstasy. There are demands that the factory be moved to the tracks.

And with so many factories and so many product demands, this requires a lot of energy, to be precise, electricity. At present, there are two biggest constraints on the development of China's space orbit projects, one is the capacity of the bridge and the other is energy.

The former question is a separate question, so let's not mention it for the time being. Let's talk about this energy problem first, because space is different from the earth, where oxygen is sent from the earth, or produced by photosynthesis, and the quantity is limited, so it is not suitable for building thermal power stations. Such an environment is also not suitable for the construction of hydro, wind, tidal, geothermal and other power stations. In such a special environment, only solar power plants and nuclear power plants are suitable.

Of course, nuclear power plants are the most powerful, with high power, and one is enough for many facilities. In the history of the original time and space, the United States and the Soviet Union successively developed nuclear-powered satellites and other things during the Cold War, and this proved to be feasible. But there is also a problem, and that is that the cost is too high. Although the fuel utilization rate of China's fourth-generation value-added reactor nuclear power plants is more than 100 times higher than that of the third-generation nuclear power plant, and the operating cost is very low, the construction cost of the power station itself is still very high. In any case, after all, this is also a radiation hazard, and it is much stricter and more expensive than conventional power plants in terms of safety alone. Besides, this is a space nuclear power plant, and the technical difficulty is even higher than that on the ground.

In space, the cheapest and most convenient energy source is solar energy, and because there is no refraction and reflection of the atmosphere in space, the utilization rate of light energy is much higher than that of the earth. Solar panels in space are not blocked by the atmosphere, there is no interference from objects such as dust and clouds, it receives sunlight eight to ten times more intensely than on Earth, and it is cleaner.

Secondly, it solves the problems of power generation interruption and poor stability that are difficult to avoid in ground-mounted solar power generation. Due to the influence of the earth's rotation, the ground solar energy can generate electricity for less than 12 hours a day, and because of the different light intensity at different times, the power generation intensity is also unstable in a day, which is also the reason why it is difficult to promote a large number of photovoltaic power stations on the ground. The solar power plant in space is completely unaffected by these factors, it can continuously receive sunlight 24 hours a day, and there will be no change in light intensity, and it can continue to generate electricity stably. The same photovoltaic panel can generate at least twenty times more electricity in space than the Earth.

What's more, no matter how low the cost of a nuclear power plant is, it still needs to be fueled, even in the fusion stage. Solar power plants do not need to consider fuel at all, and once the power supply is completed and started by orbital photovoltaic power plants, there is no need for fuel costs. Although the main structure will also have a life cost, first, there is no wind and rain in the vacuum environment of space, and the life of the steel structure is much longer. Second, even if a nuclear power plant is built on the ground, the nuclear power plant still has a main life cost.

Because of the advantages of safety, cleanliness and cheapness that nuclear power plants cannot match, Wen Desi took the orbital photovoltaic power station as a key construction project from the beginning.

In addition to providing energy for those space factories, this orbital photovoltaic power plant also has an important purpose to power the bridge itself.

The biggest problem with the bridge is its capacity limitations, and its current state is that it cannot meet the huge demand for such a large volume, and it can only send a truck every three and a half hours, or a bus every three hours. It's not that there's anything wrong with the capacity design, it's that the energy is insufficient. The two nuclear power plants attached to it can only provide such output, while the power grid in Anxi and even Xinjiang provinces can supply some of them, but not only at a high cost, but also in very limited quantities. After all, the western private power grid is designed to supply local civil, industrial and commercial electricity, and does not have much additional output, at most it can only provide 30% of the additional electricity equivalent to the Hanging Pu nuclear power plant.

If sufficient power supply is available, the number of departures of the flyover system will not be limited too much. Buses run every eight to ten minutes is not a problem. Of course, the transfer station of Tiangong-1 must be expanded to meet the transfer demand.

Since the western power grid can't provide much power, the only way left is to build new power plants. One is to build a new nuclear power plant, but this is not only costly, but also has various concerns. Is it necessary to build five, six, or even more than a dozen nuclear power plants around the Hanging Nursery Base? It is possible to add some more as appropriate, but not too much, and even if the cost is not to be mentioned, the issue of strategic security must be taken into account.

After analysis and research, it was decided that industries that could increase the transportation volume of the bridge should be prioritized on the track. This is the production of materials required for rail power stations. Photoelectric panels (i.e., photoelectric silicon wafers) as the main current collector, foam steel as the main structure, optical fiber bundles as control lines, etc. The orbital factories of these related materials need to be launched and built on a priority basis, so that the orbital photovoltaic power station can be completed as soon as possible, so as to provide more power for the bridge itself and increase its projection speed.

Therefore, from the second half of 1938, Wendesi began to gradually move some of the related factories to the track. At the same time, in addition to moving the equipment factory from the ground, it also began to use the steel frame steel plates produced by the orbital foam steel plant to start experiments and directly build space structures in space. This is the basis for the establishment of large-scale orbital photovoltaic power plants in the future.

As for how the space power station transmits electrical energy to the ground, this is the use of microwaves to transmit electricity, and the same is true in space. Orbital photovoltaic power stations convert solar energy into energy-containing electromagnetic waves, that is, microwaves in a specific band, which are then concentrated and emitted to remote receivers.

This theory was first put forward by Tesla, and after Tesla came to China, it focused on this microwave power transmission technology. In May 1926, Chinese researchers led by Tesla had crossed an important threshold of space solar power generation technology, and they successfully realized the wireless long-distance transmission of microwave-level energy on two islands 200 kilometers apart in the South Sea, which is equivalent to the thickness of the atmosphere to be penetrated from space orbit to the ground.

In recent years, significant progress has also been made in a variety of other technologies related to space solar power generation technology. About a decade ago, photoelectric efficiency (i.e., the conversion rate of light energy into electricity) was only about 15%, but now it can reach 40%. Satellite technology has also improved, including fully automated computer systems and advanced lightweight building materials. Therefore, the relevant technology has matured in the past few years, but it cannot be implemented due to capacity, and after the completion of the bridge to the sky, this project has been regarded as one of the key points. The reason why it has not yet been upgraded to "Golden Dragon" is that it is impossible to produce iron-sodium alloys that meet the requirements on earth. But once in space, these production difficulties no longer exist.

These samples were sent back to Earth one by one, and after the test, the experts went crazy, and the performance parameters were greatly increased, ranging from several times, more than ten times or even dozens of times, and the scrap rate was reduced to an incredible degree, and the cost was also reduced several times. So they all asked to move and move all these factories to space!

Yes, none of these requirements existed before the construction of the bridge. However, when the construction of the bridge was completed and the establishment of Tiangong-1 was completed, after a short-term test, a huge market and countless needs were immediately born out of thin air.

Not to mention, there are also products in various fields such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agronomy, biology, etc., which are being tested one by one, and all of them have been incredibly successful. Now, after testing the samples sent back from Tiangong-1, experts in these fields are all dancing in ecstasy. There are demands that the factory be moved to the tracks.

And with so many factories and so many product demands, this requires a lot of energy, to be precise, electricity. At present, there are two biggest constraints on the development of China's space orbit projects, one is the capacity of the bridge and the other is energy.

The former question is a separate question, so let's not mention it for the time being. Let's talk about this energy problem first, because space is different from the earth, where oxygen is sent from the earth, or produced by photosynthesis, and the quantity is limited, so it is not suitable for building thermal power stations. Such an environment is also not suitable for the construction of hydro, wind, tidal, geothermal and other power stations. In such a special environment, only solar power plants and nuclear power plants are suitable.

Of course, nuclear power plants are the most powerful, with high power, and one is enough for many facilities. In the history of the original time and space, the United States and the Soviet Union successively developed nuclear-powered satellites and other things during the Cold War, and this proved to be feasible. But there is also a problem, and that is that the cost is too high. Although the fuel utilization rate of China's fourth-generation value-added reactor nuclear power plants is more than 100 times higher than that of the third-generation nuclear power plant, and the operating cost is very low, the construction cost of the power station itself is still very high. In any case, after all, this is also a radiation hazard, and it is much stricter and more expensive than conventional power plants in terms of safety alone. Besides, this is a space nuclear power plant, and the technical difficulty is even higher than that on the ground.

In space, the cheapest and most convenient energy source is solar energy, and because there is no refraction and reflection of the atmosphere in space, the utilization rate of light energy is much higher than that of the earth. Solar panels in space are not blocked by the atmosphere, there is no interference from objects such as dust and clouds, it receives sunlight eight to ten times more intensely than on Earth, and it is cleaner.

Secondly, it solves the problems of power generation interruption and poor stability that are difficult to avoid in ground-mounted solar power generation. Due to the influence of the earth's rotation, the ground solar energy can generate electricity for less than 12 hours a day, and because of the different light intensity at different times, the power generation intensity is also unstable in a day, which is also the reason why it is difficult to promote a large number of photovoltaic power stations on the ground. The solar power plant in space is completely unaffected by these factors, it can continuously receive sunlight 24 hours a day, and there will be no change in light intensity, and it can continue to generate electricity stably. The same photovoltaic panel can generate at least twenty times more electricity in space than the Earth.

What's more, no matter how low the cost of a nuclear power plant is, it still needs to be fueled, even in the fusion stage. Solar power plants do not need to consider fuel at all, and once the power supply is completed and started by orbital photovoltaic power plants, there is no need for fuel costs. Although the main structure will also have a life cost, first, there is no wind and rain in the vacuum environment of space, and the life of the steel structure is much longer. Second, even if a nuclear power plant is built on the ground, the nuclear power plant still has a main life cost.

Because of the advantages of safety, cleanliness and cheapness that nuclear power plants cannot match, Wen Desi took the orbital photovoltaic power station as a key construction project from the beginning.

In addition to providing energy for those space factories, this orbital photovoltaic power plant also has an important purpose to power the bridge itself.

The biggest problem with the bridge is its capacity limitations, and its current state is that it cannot meet the huge demand for such a large volume, and it can only send a truck every three and a half hours, or a bus every three hours. It's not that there's anything wrong with the capacity design, it's that the energy is insufficient. The two nuclear power plants attached to it can only provide such output, while the power grid in Anxi and even Xinjiang provinces can supply some of them, but not only at a high cost, but also in very limited quantities. After all, the western private power grid is designed to supply local civil, industrial and commercial electricity, and does not have much additional output, at most it can only provide 30% of the additional electricity equivalent to the Hanging Pu nuclear power plant.

If sufficient power supply is available, the number of departures of the flyover system will not be limited too much. Buses run every eight to ten minutes is not a problem. Of course, the transfer station of Tiangong-1 must be expanded to meet the transfer demand.

Since the western power grid can't provide much power, the only way left is to build new power plants. One is to build a new nuclear power plant, but this is not only costly, but also has various concerns. Is it necessary to build five, six, or even more than a dozen nuclear power plants around the Hanging Nursery Base? It is possible to add some more as appropriate, but not too much, and even if the cost is not to be mentioned, the issue of strategic security must be taken into account.

After analysis and research, it was decided that industries that could increase the transportation volume of the bridge should be prioritized on the track. This is the production of materials required for rail power stations. Photoelectric panels (i.e., photoelectric silicon wafers) as the main current collector, foam steel as the main structure, optical fiber bundles as control lines, etc. The orbital factories of these related materials need to be launched and built on a priority basis, so that the orbital photovoltaic power station can be completed as soon as possible, so as to provide more power for the bridge itself and increase its projection speed.

Therefore, from the second half of 1938, Wendesi began to gradually move some of the related factories to the track. At the same time, in addition to moving the equipment factory from the ground, it also began to use the steel frame steel plates produced by the orbital foam steel plant to start experiments and directly build space structures in space. This is the basis for the establishment of large-scale orbital photovoltaic power plants in the future.

As for how the space power station transmits electrical energy to the ground, this is the use of microwaves to transmit electricity, and the same is true in space. Orbital photovoltaic power stations convert solar energy into energy-containing electromagnetic waves, that is, microwaves in a specific band, which are then concentrated and emitted to remote receivers.

This theory was first put forward by Tesla, and after Tesla came to China, it focused on this microwave power transmission technology. In May 1926, Chinese researchers led by Tesla had crossed an important threshold of space solar power generation technology, and they successfully realized the wireless long-distance transmission of microwave-level energy on two islands 200 kilometers apart in the South Sea, which is equivalent to the thickness of the atmosphere to be penetrated from space orbit to the ground.

In recent years, significant progress has also been made in a variety of other technologies related to space solar power generation technology. About a decade ago, photoelectric efficiency (i.e., the conversion rate of light energy into electricity) was only about 15%, but now it can reach 40%. Satellite technology has also improved, including fully automated computer systems and advanced lightweight building materials. Therefore, the relevant technology has matured in the past few years, but it cannot be implemented due to capacity, and after the completion of the bridge to the sky, this project has been regarded as one of the key points.